“Because women are everywhere, and because, as Shulamith Firestone said, a sex class is invisible because everyone takes it to be nature, and because many of the abuses that women systematically suffer are called sex, and because women are socialized in a way to make us indifferent to the plight of other women, and because there are no institutional means of redress for the crimes committed against us, feminism sometimes seems as if a group of women are standing in front of a tidal wave with one hand up saying: “Stop. “ That is why people say, “Well, it’s hopeless. “ And from “it’s hopeless, “ people say: “Well, it’s life. ”The stance of the women’s movement is that it is not “just life. “ It is politics; it is history; it is power; it is economics; it is institutional modes of social organization: it is not “just life. ” And that applies to all of it: the sexual abuse, the economic degradation, the “natural” relationship between women and children (to paraphrase Firestone again: women and children are not united by biology, we are united by politics, a shared powerlessness; I think this is true).

The women’s movement is like other political movements in one important way. Every political movement is committed to the belief that there are certain kinds of pain that people should not have to endure. They are unnecessary. They are gratuitous. They are not part of the God-given order. They are not biologically inevitable. They are acts of human will. They are acts done by some human beings to other human beings.”

— Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone